Any semi-serious reader who has moved knows it is a weighty matter. 

  Books are heavy. 

  When you’re young you collect a wall full of wine boxes, load ‘em up, and you’re good to go. But when you’re older and sometimes wiser you simply buy a whack of moving and storage boxes from U-Haul or Canadian Tire. It feels a touch like cheating but age has its benefits. 

  These store bought boxes are bigger and can only be half filled with your precious cargo. With age comes a reluctance to haul those damn heavy boxes around anymore. Elderly discretion being the better part over youthful valour we leave the top half for clothes, linen and the odd assortment of sheets we no longer know the sizes of. 

  Moving is a good time to weed out the no longer necessary, purge the superfluous. If you’re fortunate enough to move from a smaller to a larger place as I am this is painless and dare I say it … enlightening? 

  (After all this is still the Omphalos Cafe.)

  But if you’re unfortunate enough to be downsizing the ordeal can be traumatizing. The mild purge can be more of an enema, a whole system cleanse. Hard choices must be made and the prospect of regret hovers over every decision. 

  However, we all get through it. 

  The boxes are filled, carried and loaded, then carried again and finally dumped in a waiting cavernous room.

  And then the real task—the psycho-spiritually strenuous task—begins: slowly and carefully ordering and placing the jumbled pile on the floor onto the shelves in a meaningful and easily grasped array. 

  But that’s a song for tomorrow.